A real-life modern-day mentor could do wonders for one’s professional development and as such many organizations have started to recognize this and have established programs to aid younger employees get in touch and receive guidance from more experienced peers. But how many types of mentoring are there, and how can an L&D professional decide for the best option?

When learning and development programs are set up, the attention is focused solely on formal learning. That’s probably because the informal version doesn’t sit well with schedules, set objectives and quantifications. While good old fashioned learning paths are necessary and very useful, since informal learning is almost always self-initiated, it proves to be a lot more effective and with visible effects on organizational performance.

With so many resources given to corporate training, one may wonder why at this time so little attention is given to leadership development. Well-tailored e-learning is an effective way to deliver management level training as it allows the autonomy managers so badly need and the flexibility of easily fitting in training sessions into busy work schedules.

Immersive learning environments mix the worlds of leisure and work or informal and formal learning and have the potential to function as a professional learning treat, making learning fun. As the available immersive technology improves, and high speed Internet is everywhere at a very small cost, immersive learning environments should begin to play more of a role as a supplement to or major component of professional learning.

Many organisations talk about innovation and want to find new and better solutions to old problems, but they fail to equip their teams with the means to achieve these outcomes. They want out-of-the-box ideas, but at the same time they try to keep employees in their boxes as much as possible. Why do they do that? What’s stopping companies from learning and innovating?

Organizations that manage to hire talented people and help them grow are the most likely to succeed in the long run. It takes skill to balance both new and existing human capital, but creating individual development plans for each employee will surely be worth the effort. As employees grow, so does the success of the organization because the most valuable assets are those who walk into the office or log on remotely each day.

Providing relevant learning opportunities and professional development for employees is certainly a significant investment from the part of companies. Couple this with a foggy ROI, and you can’t really blame managers for searching for options and consider all the ways to cut training costs. Opting for delivering online training is a cost-effective way of investing in employees while optimizing budgets.

Building a learning culture, providing personalized learning experiences to each employee and preparing for unexpected disruptions that will inevitably arise in the ever-changing business environment are three things that will become more and more important in determining companies’ success in the future and L&D professionals will certainly have a role to play in this.

Corporate trainers should not worry about going extinct any time soon. E-learning has the capacity to make their lives and jobs significantly easier. A lot of subjects that used to be a bore can now be delivered in e-learning form. Since classroom trainers do a lot more than simply deliver content in front of an audience, e-learning is actually there to make their job easier and more interesting rather than obsolete.

Whether it’s classroom or e-learning, training is costly in terms of money and time. So it is only natural for businesses to want be able to quantify the value that training sessions bring to the organization. Of course learning itself is never really over but a training cycle is deemed complete once its effectiveness has been evaluated and plans for the next steps on the learning path have been drawn.